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How the iMac Saved Apple
- pipeline_peak 3y agoThe iMac hasn't had a significant design change since the G5. It was almost like the progression was in terms of form factor. Now that they've switched to laptop components, they've achieved the compactness they wanted.
- anthk 3y ago>Consumers, not creators. Uh, in my country that was exactly the reverse. Macs were for creation people: journalists, writers, audio and video producers, press people, cinema, poster designs, comic books... everything multimedia related. If you knew what CMYK/RGB does mean, you'd probably be using a Mac at work.
- TillE 3y agoThat was the traditional Mac audience through the 80s and 90s. The point is that the iMac was an attempt to reach beyond that, to home users who just wanted to browse the internet and stuff.
- mruniverse 3y agoYes, at the time it was all about desktop publishing and graphic design. It wasn't until the end of the 90s that PCs started to make its way into that niche. Also it didn't feel like Apple was for consumers until the iPod came out.
- pjmlp 3y agoPCs were already in that niche pretty much all over the world since Windows 95 got introduced, until the Apple recovery they were mostly an US focused company, they weren't going bankrupt for nothing. In Portugal, nowadays there are Apple Stores all over the big cities, although people still mostly buy them on credit and cable TV deals, back in those days there was a single vendor, Interlog in Lisbon, that would sell for the whole country. Buying Apple gear meant either traveling to Lisbon, having them coming to the company if big enough or a renowed university, or buying by catalog in the listings from computer magazines.
- grishka 3y agoThis. When I was a kid in the 90s, I was told that "there's also Apple, they make Macintosh computers, those are very expensive but very good with colors and fonts". The only time I saw that first-gen iMac, and classic Mac OS when it was still current, was at some kind of computer exhibition. My next contact with Mac OS was in the late 00s when I discovered Hackintosh and the fact that my desktop at the time can run it.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI think that was when Jobs was deciding to bifurcate Apple's product line into the Pro and Consumer. Obviously the iMac was Consumer ... Apple would still cater to the Pro market, the creatives, but the iMac was not that machine.
- furyofantares 3y agoWhy in the world do people cut from the article and respond to something it didn't say? Here's the quote from the article. > But Apple reasoned that most people were consumers, not creators.
- NovaDudely 3y agoOne amission that I always see from this period of Apple is the impact of Gil Amelio's decisions and how much gets attributed to Jobs. This is not to undermine Jobs, he was absolutely the right person in the right place and figured out how to really sway project into shape and communicate the changes the company was making. Projects like the iMac were already underway before jobs returned under the wings of Amelio. In the same way the whole focus on education and the simplification to 4 computer types was later attributed to Jobs once Gil was out. That said, there was 10 month between Gil being ousted and the iMac being revieled so there was plenty of time for Jobs to put the finishing touches on that one could argue was what a lot of Apple products really needed at that time. But I suspect under Gil it would have been called something stupid like 'Machintosh for internet - 7400E'.
- threeseed 3y agoBut Jobs was the one who partnered with Ive on the design of the iMac. If the iMac had launched with a similar design to the Power Macs it would have been ignored by the media and consumers. But true that many of the operational changes of the company mostly came from Gil. But also Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian etc deserve a lot of credit for shaking up the software and hardware teams.
- jrmg 3y agoThe 1998 ‘Power Macintosh G3 All In One’ is an interesting stepping stone to the iMac. Beige, blockier than the iMac, but noticeably curvier than preceding Power Macs. A return to the single unit design, and the first use of translucent plastic. https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3_All-In-One https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Power_Macintosh_G3_All-In-One
- pavlov 3y agoI believe the first use of translucent plastic by Apple was the Newton eMate 300, designed by Jonathan Ive and released in early 1997 when Gil Amelio was still CEO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300 The photo in the Wikipedia article isn't very good. The actual color of the translucent plastic is a brighter teal, fairly close to the "Bondi Blue" of the iMac that followed.
- indigoabstract 3y agoI remember seeing an iMac in a Cher video around '98 or '99. There weren't that many computers on TV in those days and this was the first time I'd see one in a music video. I thought it looked like a bubblegum toy computer for kids so I didn't want one. I was a kid myself, but hey, all the computers I was familiar with were serious beige boxes and this didn't seem "professional" enough. But I was intrigued. I'm also intrigued about the "Princess Bride" analogy in the article, I'm still processing that. Is SJ being compared to Cary Elwes or am I missing the joke?
- neogodless 3y ago> he rapidly ran down a list of the company’s assets and liabilities. Apple didn’t have a wheelbarrow or a holocaust cloak, but it did have a young industrial designer who had been experimenting with colors and translucent plastic There's a scene where the Man in Black is barely alive / awake after taking The Miracle Pill, while Fezzik and Inigo are telling him he has to help them stop the wedding and rescue the princess. He says "and our assets?" As little as they have, it just happens to be exactly what they need to give them an advantage. I suppose if Steve Jobs came in and asked someone at Apple to list their assets, then yes, he's being compared to the Man in Black, as he's asked to save the day! > With Jobs’ brains, Jony Ive’s designs, and the new PowerPC G3 chip supplied by Motorola, the company began to form a plan.
- indigoabstract 3y agoAh, I see, that makes more sense now. Thank you.
- voytec 3y agoAnd now we have fifty shades of Space Gray.
- stringsandchars 3y ago> And now we have fifty shades of Space Gray. I understand your need to take a dig at Apple, but the current iMac comes in orange, purple, pink, yellow, blue, green and silver.
- fomine3 3y agoI wonder will they leave from aluminum unibody on Mac anytime. It's very long lifetime.
- sgjohnson 3y ago> It's very long lifetime. It’s also a timeless design. The 2008 unibody MacBooks look like they could have been made brand new yesterday, with the only giveaways being the I/O and the bezels on the display. It’s safe to say that the design will almost certainly (reasonably) never get old.
- einr 3y agoYou could sell the Power Mac G5 from 2003 today and it would still look pretty sleek and modern. Yes, it has an optical drive and Firewire ports, but on the whole...
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- benoliver999 3y agoMy mate's family had one, and I thought it was really cool as a kid. Then I started using it and wondered what people actually used it for, it seemed to do nothing I was used to doing on other computers. And even though now it's obvious why you'd buy a Mac, that's been my relationship with them ever since! Hardware envy, but I like Linux too much to leave it behind.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoAt the time they were marketed (if I recall correctly?) mainly for browsing the internet; my first experience with a Mac was an iMac at the local library, getting 20 or 30 minutes of internet, and sitting there with my dad thinking "...now what?". I think we went to the Lego website and things like that.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago> mainly for browsing the internet That was what the “i” in “iMac” was for. It had a built-in 56K modem, with an RJ-11 jack.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y agoI came from the other direction - used windows, admired Linux but neither was the sweet spot. OSX's brilliant UI combined with the power of a Unix-like system underneath was a perfect combo.
- rimliu 3y agoIt is not UNIX-like, OS X was Unix (excepct for Lion), and macOS is Unix.
- mkurz 3y agoThen I recommend Asahi Linux, using it on a MacBook Pro since 12 month now exclusively and it's awesome.
- hoherd 3y agoI have a similar beginning story, especially with the wondering what people actually used it for. "Where's the terminal?" My story diverged from yours when one of my Mac using friends said "Apple is releasing a Unix based OS." I thought "oh please make it Unix with an awesome GUI." I was so tired of working on my GUI in linux instead of working with it. I just wanted Wi-Fi to work, I wanted wake from sleep to work consistently, I didn't want my graphics drivers to break or be so much different to configure on a different device. I wanted a consistent trackpad experience. And Apple delivered. Some of my happiest feelings of my first Mac, the 12" mbp, were about how little I used it because I was able to open it, quickly do what I wanted, and then close it. I had been using Linux as my daily driver, but switched to OS X 10.2.6, and have been there ever since. Between then and now I've used a fair variety of unixes for work, like aix, hpux, solaris, FreeBSD, and linux, and I've never been without at least a few Linux boxes at my house, but I find that the macOS GUI does the best job of getting out of the way so I can get to work. Every once in a while I try out a Linux GUI, hoping that I'll be compelled to give it a shot as my primary work environment. I have an old Thinkpad that I keep loaded with some desktop flavor, but I always run into things that steer me back to macOS.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThis colorfully compelling ad really hit the spot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kR6Kwcr6tU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kR6Kwcr6tU
- secretsatan 3y agoI still have mine, I power it up every couple of years to see if it still works.
- Lammy 3y ago> I can type on a 25-year-old iMac USB keyboard attached to a 2023 Mac Mini with no adapters! What stunning longevity. The keyboard is fine though laptop-sized with cramped arrow keys, but the original revision iMac puck mouse is a famous case of form over function. It's not actually as bad as its reputation suggests, but Apple still silently admitted to the flawed design by adding a little centered dimple to the butan on the later five-colors version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse “There's no reason that the Macintosh won't be an absolutely perfect gaming platform for anything that you wanna do. […] The only thing that you wanna do with a Mac as a serious gamer — you wanna pull out the silly one-button mouse and plug in a three-button mouse pretty quick, but aside from that…” — John Carmack, 1999 https://youtu.be/XzbFgzgy1mc?t=4791 https://youtu.be/XzbFgzgy1mc?t=4791
- vel0city 3y agoI was a small child when the iMac and its hockey puck mouse came out. I remember being a small kid and thinking the hockey puck mouse was actually pretty great, it was way easier for my small hands to handle and the single button made things easier to click on for the educational software I was using at school compared to the Packard Bell or HP or Dell mice I would use at home or at friend's houses. I'm actually looking for a similar kind of mouse for my small child today. He can't quite palm a mouse very well, and he often gets mixed up with right click and scroll and scroll click. When I get him focused on the right mouse button he can play some basic mouse-based games but he'll often end up getting distracted by the mouse wheel or right click which can sometimes drop him out of the games he's wanting to play. Don't get me wrong the hockey puck mouse was probably atrocious for adult hands but as a little kid it was actually pretty nice.
- WWLink 3y agoGet an iMac mouse off eBay then. They’re usb and still work fine with any computer. Edit: but there is one concern - they are not optical mice and use a ball. So if they’re really young you might want something more like an apple pro mouse
- Findecanor 3y agoThe iMac and the return of Jobs really felt like a fresh new start for Apple at the time. However, after a while the design language was picked up by other brands ... and you could see translucent and coloured plastic on pretty much all types of products for a while: from PCs to home electronics to toilet paper holders, and by then it started to feel a little tacky.
- hospitalJail 3y agoDoesnt this lend to that it was all marketing/psychology tricks? I hate reading how easily humans are exploited.
- prmoustache 3y agoWas it that successful? I don't recall having seen many of those in the wild. I mean not more than the beige mac they replaced. Same households, same businesses. The white ibook G4 was really the one I saw starting making dent at the pc market, especially with students.
- twoodfin 3y agoIt was hugely successful. They sold millions at at time when a highly successful computer model would sell a few hundred thousand boxes. It’s absolutely accurate to say the iMac is the product that launched the modern era of Apple. Had it been a flop the company likely would have gone under.
- prmoustache 3y ago"millions" is a big vague. Do you have a number of units solds for the first gen imac G3 compared to say, the combined sales of all the Macintosh PowerMacintosh/Performa models of the generation before and the global growth of regular PC at the time? My perception, and I emphasize in the word perception, because I lack numbers, is that the early imac and ibook were quite ridiculized for their appearance and the imac/ibook/probook series started being fashionable and successful items the generation after those: white ibook, flat LCD panel imac G4, titanium powerbooks...Those were the ones you would see elsewhere compared to the aquarium looking imac g3 and the clamshell "toilet seat" ibook that nobody wanted to be seen with. Hence me looking for numbers instead of praising news article written with rose tinted glasses and without sales numbers. And I mean by that it may have saved apple temporarily by at least reversing/flattening the curb while not being a mega success. Macs were losing market share every year, just not losing more market share or gaining a little bit can be considered a success even without making a huge dent in the PC market.
- twoodfin 3y agohttps://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/19/how-apple-went-from-bust-to-five-million-colorful-imacs-sold/amp/ https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/04/19/how-apple-went-fr...
- iddan 3y agoWhen I was in high school my art department planned to throw away an original iMac blue, knowing the culutral significance of this machine I told them I'll take it but because it was public property (that was planned to be thrown out but anyway) I had to sneak in the end of the day and pick it up. I took it on my hands for 90 minutes on the way home (don't let the handle fool you this thing is heavy!) but I love it and my friends are always in awe I've got one
- somat 3y agoWhen I was in high school I noticed my library was replacing their vt terminals with pc's. I asked if I could buy a terminal and they said just stop by when we close and we will give you one. I was expecting one of the beat up ones used for public card catalog lookup but they gave me the deluxe setup they used behind the desk a vt420 with a dot matrix printer and a wand type barcode scanner. What a score. I wired it up in my little brothers(10) room. He would play nethack and make elaborate barcode based auth systems with it. A lot of fun. I still have strange dreams of running an entire office off terminals to this day. Strangely nobody has taken me up on it yet. But the real lesson is do your part and help a poor high school kid.
- wink 3y agoWe had the colorful ones at my first onsite dev job (a design agency) and they were constantly crashing, so my experience was 100% negative. Honestly surprised about people having good memories. OS X was pretty nice when it launched, that would have been the time where I had pinpointed some saving.
- wildrhythms 3y agoWe used an iMac G3 for years to run a live production lighting and sound system (as late as 2006) and it was very reliable, I can't remember it crashing once.
- wil421 3y agoI used them for years in school and everyone hated them. Not sure if it was the software or hardware. Same issue with my friends pre-iMac Mac. We could barely get through a game without beach ball spinning forever or crashing.
- yankput 3y agoYeah the original article is a bit of rose tinted glasses. The iMacs were pretty and started a lot of HW innovation but the actual experience of using them was not great. OS 8/OS 9 were still bad operating systems, and the first few releases of OS X were not very stable either.
- celsoazevedo 3y agoSimilar experience at my school. Almost every computer was a PC, but we had a room with 10-15 blue G3 and sometimes we had to use them to "research" for school projects. I didn't hated them, but we avoided them because they were noticeably slower than the PCs we had. I also remember the mouse being a bit weird. They looked nice, but didn't work as well for us as the boring beige towers.
- speedgoose 3y agoThe experience could depend on the software people were running. Mac OS 8 and 9 didn’t even have memory protection. A program with faulty memory management, which wasn’t uncommon since it was before the creation of the wonderful and magnificent Rust, could very well destroy the runtime memory of other programs and even the kernel…
- rcarmo 3y agoI used a Bondi Blue one to build ISP onboarding CDs, and the puck mouse was hideously bad. Nevertheless, the machines were quite popular, although I waited for the iBook to seriously get into OSX.
- fideloper 3y agoI was in college when these were popular. Apple had their hands on education for sure, as most buildings had at least one room with rows and rows of the blue iMacs. The library and others had publicly available iMacs. I had a job doing inventory for the schools accounting department (not to be confused with Accounting, the education department) - I tagged a lot of computers. In competition with departments getting iMac’s were ones getting cheap, unpowered Dell desktops.
- mikece 3y agoNot only saved Apple but, in a nutshell, was the summary of what Apple would be going forward: ultra user-friendly design, chic advertising, and sufficient functionality for all basic to intermediate users.
- ubermonkey 3y agoMust be weird how all those intermediate developers flocked to Powerbooks and Macbooks soon after, huh?
- jccalhoun 3y agoIt is wild how the translucent plastic thing took over. From other companies trying to make imac look alikes to totally different products. I used to have an ad of irons that came in a variety of colors arranged in a circle like the imac ad.
- walthamstow 3y agoI still have my GameBoy Color with the translucent purple case. Amazed me as a child that I could see inside the thing. I don't know the dates that well as I was a child but I assume the iMac influenced Nintendo.
- mcphage 3y agoI do too! Honestly: it still looks great.
- HeckFeck 3y agoI love that style; takes me back to my youth. I still have a translucent blue extension lead from that era, and it's currently used for my home A/V. That marks over 20 years of service. I also remember Nintendo 64s and their controllers coming in see-through cases. These cases were available in a variety of bright colours. Ref: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/87/ae/3c87ae0913e29c2109cc7518ea4fc2c6.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/87/ae/3c87ae0913e29c2109cc... It can't all be rose tinted glasses; the world was genuinely more colourful back then.
- green_leaves 3y ago> The iMac gets remembered for a lot of things, and rightly so, but it doesn’t get enough credit for essentially kick-starting the USB revolution That's not true. USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98. Apple innovated a lot, but frequently get credit for many that didn't come from them.
- sosborn 3y ago"Kick-starting the USB revolution" doesn't mean the same thing as "innovation." They only included USB on the original iMac, which was a death-knell for the legacy connectors, and quite controversial at the time given the iMac's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
- green_leaves 3y agoI pretty much see adoption of technology as innovation. Not technical innovation for sure, but innovation in the sense of significant improvement over other solutions. Don't you consider the original Mac adoption of the 3.5" floppy drive as innovation?
- LanceH 3y agoNo, it's forced adoption. You have a houseful of 5.25" and need a new computer and have no options now. That's hardly innovative.
- krger 3y ago>USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98. Yes. USB ports certainly existed on PCs prior to the iMac's release in August 1998 and announcement in May 1998. They were, however, largely unused because of a lack of mass-market USB peripherals. Keyboards and mice used PS/2 ports. Printers (and ZIP drives!) used parallel ports. More expensive peripherals (storage and scanners) used SCSI. A handful of other devices used RS-232 serial. Go back to those old PC World magazines and look for the mass-market USB peripherals available for sale and let me know what you find. Starting with the iMac-inspired Cambrian explosion in USB peripherals and for a rather lengthy period of time measured in years afterwards, it was actually rather difficult to find USB peripherals that were not made out of translucent plastic to match iMacs. Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
- ubermonkey 3y agoIt's an entirely predictable thing, but I find that at my age (53) I've started being kind of stunned at how some aspects of computing history have become just that to younger people: History, with perhaps no more real bearing on the hear-and-now for younger people than, say, the Teapot-Dome scandal. I've had a number of conversations with people in the last few years who didn't work through the 90s, and who therefore had NO idea the absolutely stranglehold MSFT had on computing in that era. And I get it; it's hard to see today, when we have 5 or 6 viable platforms to work on (two flavors of mobile; Mac; Windows; ChromeOS; Linux). The degree to which being non-Windows in that era put you in a bit of a desert, especially as Apple hit its darkest years, is really really difficult to grasp now. If you try to explain the wildly predatory things MSFT did, like insisting that every computer sold include a Windows license, they just sound like evil overlord plots. "Whoa, that can't be right..." And maybe the biggest one is the fact that Apple itself -- now a juggernaut of profitability and stability, and a real leader in the industry on several fronts -- very nearly went under, which would've taken with it the only other viable desktop OS of the time, further cementing Redmond's domination. Its recovery, starting with the iMac, is absolutely one of the greatest turnarounds in American business history. Obviously, it wasn't all Steve, and required a lot of things to go their way, but the results are still amazing to me. And yet: If you're 25, Apple has ALWAYS been who Apple is today. If you're 25, we've always had great options for computing environments with near-parity experiences. If you're 25, no single vendor has had anything like the kind of market power MSFT had. It's a weird thing to realize the events of your early adulthood have become paragraphs in history books but here we are.
- nkotov 3y agoThe iMac G3 was the very first computer I got to use. Our school district had several in every classroom and a couple computer labs. I distinctly remember using Scholastic software called Reading Counts, as well as KidPix on OS 9. Eventually, some of the older G3s got replaced with the eMac running OS X and then the district switched completely over to running Windows XP on Dell. That brief exposure to Apple and the creative colors makes me miss the times when using computers felt fun. I think the closest I felt to that later on was around the time when Vista came out and everyone was using WindowBlinds to change their theme up.
- ecf 3y agoOur school didn’t have any in each classroom, but rather a dedicated computer lab with enough for the entire class. Surprisingly they were loaded with a few games and learning we could play Cro-Mag Rally multiplayer over LAN while the teacher wasn’t paying attention is a core memory of mine.
- nkotov 3y agoWe had Bugdom installed at our elementary school and I was surprised to play a 3D game for the first time.
- ericzawo 3y agoKidPix was a revelatory piece of software for children in the 90s.
- dr-detroit 3y ago[dead]
- xattt 3y agoOne of the first apps I got for the iPad.
- wpwpwpw 3y agoAlthough the first computer I used was a Macintosh Classic, the iMac G3 rev. C was the first I used to browse the internet, and the lack of games was a bless as because of that I learned to program out of teenager's curiosity. Although I now use Linux in a PC and I don't like Apple anymore, in that era up until snow leopard it was a pleasure to use.
- erickhill 3y agoThe noseless Steve Jobs, in such a detailed illustration, was a curious choice by the illustrator.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- erickhill 3y agoThe "Ruby" iMac was the first Apple computer I could afford to buy, and I loved it. In fact, I still have it and it works beautifully (except for the CD tray, which to my knowledge is unrepairable as there are no replacement devices out there - I have to use a firewire external instead). I'd used Apple computers throughout art school in the 90s, and absolutely loved the UI. I used Windows NT at work, and the iMac at home. Back then I used Earthlink to get online and check my email. I used Macromedia products for web design. And Adobe products for, well, photoshop mainly. Later in the early 2000's when I saw people upgrading to OS X, I clung to 9.2.2 and made that machine keep that OS forever. I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds of the earlier OS. Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy.
- jwells89 3y ago> I later got an iBook with OS X and loved the new experience, but I always missed (and still do) the look and feel and sounds of the earlier OS. > > Simply opening and closing the Control Strip was a joy. It’s too bad that Classic Mac OS soundsets didn’t make the cut when selecting features to bring over to OS X. I can understand why they might disabled by default but they would’ve been nice to have as an option. Same for Appearance Manager themes, really. That feature was never really marketed much and many users probably didn’t even know they existed since OS 8.5-9.2 only included Platinum, but it was cool to have theming capabilities on par with the third party Kaleidoscope (which is unparalleled on modern operating systems — not even Linux can compare) built right in, but that’s just not something that could’ve happened worth Jobs at the helm.
- erickhill 3y agoA couple of years ago I discovered a way to make my modern Macs produce the “bonnng” chime on boot-up. It’s actually still there but hidden for some reason. IIRC I had to enable it via the Terminal, which seemed really weird. But it was a total joy when it sprang back to life.
- glhaynes 3y ago
- epc 3y agoI bought one in November 1998 ($1299 then, roughly $2400 today). It was an upgrade for me from an ancient Mac SE I’d had since 1990. The thing that struck me then was how easy the online purchase process was. There were very few options to pick from. It looks like I ordered it on 10/24/98 and had it by 10/28/98, which too was fast compared to other online computer purchases I’d done that year. And…it just worked out of the box. No messing around with IRQs and other tweaks that I had to use with my work day systems. Software was limited but IIRC Microsoft had updated Office as part of the earlier deal with Apple, and between Office, the dotMac suite, and web browser you could do most routine things just fine. Apple just totally nailed the end to end experience of buying, shipping, and using the system, which was a refreshing change from the status quo those days.
- nobleach 3y agoI was using a similarly spec'ed home-built PC at that time. It was an ugly beige box with a 15" beige monitor. I convinced my girlfriend to buy that Bondi-Blue box with only USB ports as she needed a new computer for her upcoming semester. We purchased it at the on-campus "Apple Store". It was the slickest computer buying experiences EVER. We had a Gateway 2000 store in town around that time. Trying to buy a computer there was such a nightmare. Apple really figured out the "experience" part of buying and owning a computer.
- detourdog 3y agoThe Gateway stores was the example given by every analyst on CNBC for why Apple couldn’t have a store.
- nobleach 3y agoI can kind of understand. Apple at that time period wasn't very "think different" yet. Gil Amelio still had the company in its own "beige box" era. The idea that a store would be selling a "less compatible" computer seemed insane. Turned out to be a game changer.
- isykt 3y ago
- jgrahamc 3y agoI guess I was wrong when I wrote this song parody in 2001: March 22, 2001: "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" Steve Jobs was back at Apple, the blue iMac was out, Microsoft was in big anti-trust trouble and had just invested $100m in Apple, Steve had bought out NeXT. But the future wasn't yet assured: This won't be easy, you'll think it's strange. When we try to explain what we need that we now need your help after all that we've said. You won't believe us. All you'll see is Apple you once knew, although we've crashed down in the dumps begging for Microsoft cash. It didn't have to happen. We should have won Better software and patents than Bill Looking down on Windows, staying far from Sun. So we chose NeXT. Running aground, trying computers in blue. But nothing revived us at all. You never expected it too. Don't cry for us, William H. Gates. The truth is we're dead without you. We need your dollars We need Mac Office You need a rival, for your survival. And as for Fortune, and as for Time, We never invited them in though it appeared, to the world, they were all Steve desired. Even Adobe, they're making solutions for Windows right now The answer was here all the time. We need you, and hope you need us. [chorus] Have we begged too much? There's nothing more we can think of to say to you. But all you have to do, is look at us to know, we're through without you.
- chalcolithic 3y agoI get it that at some point (long time ago) Apple traded colors for resolution and had a highest resolution monochrome screen among the generic computers. That allowed it to occupy a desktop publishing niche. I get it that for certain amount of time iPhone had (has?) the best photo / video capabilities among the smartphones. But overall the Apple's market success is not something that I can easily understand. iMac success in particular is a mystery to me.
- LanceH 3y agoNon computer people were discovering the internet at the same time.
- EamonnMR 3y agoMuch of my earliest experience with computing was on these, because they had them at school. Hyperstudio was my first taste of building little interactive applications. EV Override was the first game that felt like it contained an entire world. It was sad to see them eventually treated as junk - I have one myself that I pulled out of an e-waste container a few years back.
- shon 3y agoI remember very well when the iMac was released. I was a fledgling IT Manager in SoCal and went to the local Fry’s Electronics to check out an iMac. It was the first time I had ever seen a line of people out the door with computers in their shopping carts. What made all of this more remarkable is that most tech-savvy people knew that both the hardware and software (OS) were sub-par as Apple had gone through a long period without great direction. But this is the genius of Jobs. He regains control of Apple and with minimal resources figures out how to sell a very mediocre computer computer by the truckload. The packaging (not just the box or case) was brilliant. Old hardware, mediocre software, wrapped in a beautiful, unique package with enough nice features and a low price to make it sell very well. Up to that point I’d never owned an Apple product, and the iMac was not enough to sway me. It took OS X, adding BSD to the core of the OS, along much more beautiful and much improved hardware in the form of the 2002- era MacBook Pro. Still all in all a stroke of genius. My main personal computing devices (outside gaming and server rigs) have been Apple ever since.
- pjdesno 3y agoNote that Intel machines had been shipping with USB ports for two years before the iMac came out, but there weren't any devices available to plug into them. (plus Microsoft didn't support it in their consumer OSes until Windows 98)
- delphi4711 3y agoI used a usb flash drive in Windows NT4 and Windows 95 :).
- Eric_WVGG 3y agoI've got kind of a funny story of how I got my first Mac. I moved from SLC to Portland in 2000, and had it in my head that I would join a graphic design firm as their on-hand developer. (At the time, I was of the opinion that design and development should happen under the same roof, a belief that ultimately proved correct, but under the other roof.) So I spent months shopping around my resume — with a prominent link to my website — to mostly-confused graphic designers, and didn't get a single callback or even an email saying "thanks but no." After around six months I sort of gave up and became the UI guy at a shipping company. At the shipping co, I saw a bunch of "smurf" Powermac G4s in the corner. "Yeah those are for testing, but nobody uses Macs so we don't really care." I decided to take a look at my website on the latest version of MSIE just for the hell of it. Instant computer crash. A bug in MSIE's CSS engine took down the whole computer. Not just the browser, the whole thing. All graphic designers at the time were still on Mac Classic, OS X had no penetration yet. I had been walking into offices, and turning off computers with unsaved work for months. The first thing I did with some spending cash was get a "graphite" 400mhz iMac G3, installed OS X as I was becoming disenchanted with Windows, and soon found that I liked using that pathetically slow machine far more than my tricked-out 1.6ghz AMD Athlon.
- demondemidi 3y agoI remember when people lost their minds because Apple dropped the floppy drive. And surprisingly, in this thread, people are still angry about it.
- tjr 3y agohttps://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21 https://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/1998/10/21
- demondemidi 3y agoI can't believe FoxTrot is still going.
- duxup 3y agoFloppies, not two floppies, headphone jacks. History repeats itself as far as what is "needed" to use technology. It's one thing after another that vanishes with few if any consequences. I always think of this old painting. I don't disagree with those folks to some extent, but man things change and rarely do they change back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers#/media/File:Boyaryna_Morozova_by_V.Surikov_(1884-1887,_Tretyakov_gallery).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers#/media/File:Boya...
- piperswe 3y agoThis acts as a reminder that I should fix the G3 I have sitting on my shelf with what's probably a screwed up flyback transformer... but I'm kinda scared of working on a CRT (never done it before)
- Sakos 3y agoThe blue and white Power Mac G3 is still one of my favourite PC designs ever. And I never owned a Mac until my current Macbook. I've always wanted one and I still want one, even if just to put in the corner and admire because it's so aesthetic and pretty.
- bitwize 3y agoMy wife had a Tangerine iMac. She used to chat with me on IRC with it. That's how she met me, online, 25 years ago this year (she used a PowerBook before getting the Tangerine).
- amadeuspagel 3y ago> But the rise of online services and the internet in the mid-1990s gave Apple a unique opportunity. On the internet, nobody knew you were using a Mac. Once you connected, you were using AOL or CompuServe or just your local internet provider and a web browser or email app. While some sites didn’t function if you weren’t using Internet Explorer for Windows, most worked fine. Contrast with their view of the internet today, now that they own the mobile platform that is dominant in the most important market.
- someNameIG 3y ago> When Apple’s next-generation Power Mac tower arrived in a blue and white coating, professional users rebelled. (Subsequent models were a more stately gray, and to this day, Apple prefers to release all of its “Pro” products with little to no color.) One thing I'd like is that Apple would have their pro product line offer more colours.
- droptablemain 3y ago"and pave the way for Apple to become the most important technology company ever" Yikes, that's a hell of a statement about a company with 20% global market share on smartphones and 8% on PCs -- as well as a negligible enterprise and server share. Apple's only the most important technology company to the professional-managerial class, where the social clout gained by owning an Apple product is much more important than the product itself.
- itisit 3y agoYou cannot deny the vast positive competitive influence Apple has had on personal computing over the last 25 years. They take a pass at improving the experience of whatever it is, and everyone significantly ups their game thereafter. You don't have to like them, but it's foolishly disingenuous to suggest their significance is limited to their sales or their marketability.
- gdubs 3y agoForgive me for making a comment that's very much not the point of the piece but I find Steve Jobs lack of nose in that illustration really unsettling. More to the point, I remember when our computer lab got an entire room of iMacs and I can still remember their new smell, and how exciting it was to have them. We also got a lab full of the candy colored G3(?)s for the film & video students. Also, the advertising was fresh.
- paradox460 3y agoI liked the gumdrop iMac, really liked the G4 towers, but absolutely loved the sunflower iMac. It's still one of my favorite computer designs of all time, followed closely by the original G5
- Kon-Peki 3y agoI never wanted or bought one, but the original iMac was pretty interesting in hindsight. - The colors screamed "I use a computer but am not a computer person". Back then, culturally, being a computer person was not as accepted as it is now. - The slightly translucent plastic allowed you to see a little bit of the innards, but not so clearly. This gave the computer case some depth and complexity that you would never otherwise get in "cheap" molded plastic. - The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for. - The stacking of the internal components and the location of the vents allowed the computer to be fanless yet have sufficient cooling. Convection created by the heat of the CRT generated airflow to cool the CPU.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago> The iMac was underpowered even at introduction. But it showed that computers had already reached the point at which they have more processing power than needed to accomplish almost anything you needed a computer for. ...is that actually true? Because it launched with a 233MHz G3, and although my memory is hazy, I remember people specifically pointing out that on most available cross-platform benchmarks it beat whatever Pentium II was current then. That situation didn't last, but I have specific memories of "This is a cheap home computer that's faster than Dell's highest end tower".